The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

By Bernard L. Herman

This book invites readers into a growing, dynamic conversation among scholars and critics around a vibrant community of artists from an African American South. This constellation of creative makers includes familiar figures, such as Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, and quiltmakers Nettie Young and Mary Lee Bendolph, whose work is collected in major museum and private collections. The artists represented extend to lesser-known but equally compelling creators working across a wide range of artistic forms, themes, and geographies. The essays gathered here, accompanied by a generous selection of full-color plates, survey subjects such as the artists' engagement with enslavement and liberation, the spiritual and religious dimensions of their work, the technical aspects of their work (such as the common use of "assemblage" as an artistic medium), the links between art and biography, and the evolving status of their reception in narratives of contemporary, modern, southern, and American art.

Contributors are Celeste-Marie Bernier, Laura Bickford, Michael J. Bramwell, Elijah Heyward III, Sharon P. Holland, and Pamela J. Sachant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: May 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469668536

Book preview

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF UNSETTLED THINGS

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF UNSETTLED THINGS

Art from an African American South

Edited by

BERNARD L. HERMAN

With contributions from

CELESTE-MARIE

BERNIER

LAURA BICKFORD

MICHAEL J. BRAMWELL

ELIJAH HEYWARD III

SHARON P. HOLLAND

PAMELA J. SACHANT

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with support from the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Published with the assistance of the H. Eugene and Lillian Lehman Fund of the University of North Carolina Press

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Interior design by Julie Allred

Set in Macklin and Korolev Compressed by BW&A Books, Inc.

Cover illustration: Lonnie Holley, What Was beyond Us (The Ocean of Our Thoughts), 2019. Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, L2020.10.1a-o. Lent by John A. Powell, BA ’77. © 2021 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Frontispiece: Hawkins Bolden, Untitled (Ham Can), 1970s. Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.2. © 2021 Estate of Hawkins Bolden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Complete Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010463.

For Emily Kass

who saw a path and took it

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things

Art from an African American South

Bernard L. Herman

Put Honey in the Sky Where It Could Drip and Make the World Sweet

Looking for Purvis Young and Thomas Samuel Doyle, but Seeing Something Else: Meditations on the Matter of Black Freedom

Sharon P. Holland

Had to Learn Surviving

Imaging Slavery and Imagining Freedom in Black Lexicons of Liberation

Celeste-Marie Bernier

Heard a Voice, Saw a Light

Spiritual Implications of Creative Belief in Black Vernacular Art

Michael J. Bramwell

When Everything Stands Still, That’s When the Griot Spirit Come On

History-Making and Assemblage in the African American South

Laura Bickford

Biography—Writing Lives; Art—Viewing Lives

Pamela J. Sachant

The South Has Always Had Something to Say

Elijah Heyward III

Acknowledgments

Notes

Contributors

Index

Plate 1 Irene Williams (American, 1920–2015), Quilt (Lazy Gal/Housetop Variation) , 2004. Cloth, 94 × 79 in. (238.8 × 200.7 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.52.8. © 2021 Estate of Irene Williams / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 2 Lonnie Holley (American, b. 1950), Balancing the Rock , 2007. Wood, stone, metal, rubber, nails, and wire, 24 ¼ × 15 ½ × 5 in. (61.6 × 39.4 × 12.7 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift / purchase from Lonnie Holley and the William S. Arnett Collection through the Caldwell Family Artist-in-Residence Fund and the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020.26. © 2021 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 3 Luster Willis (American, 1913–1990), This Is It. The Big One , n.d. Tempera and glitter on paper, 18 × 27 ¼ in. (45.7 ×69.2 cm).

Photo courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. © 2021 Estate of Luster Willis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 4 Lucy T. Pettway (American, 1921–2004), Cat and Mice , 1976. Cloth, 82 × 65 in. (208.3 × 165.1 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the William S. Arnett Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2016.12.9. © 2021 Estate of Lucy T. Pettway / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 5 Thornton Dial (American, 1928–2016), Walking with the Pick-Up Bird , 2002. Steel, twine, cloth, shoes, crockery, auto tire scrap, enamel, spray paint, and Splash Zone compound, approximately 53 × 63 × 34 in. (134.6 × 160 × 86.4 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.52.3. Photo by Stephen Pitkin Studio. © 2021 Estate of Thornton Dial / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 6 Thomas Samuel Doyle (American, 1906–1985), Hopeing Boy , 1970s. Paint on tin, 45 × 27 in. (114.3 × 68.6 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.5.

Plate 7 Joe Minter (American, b. 1943), The Royal Family in Chains , 1991. Metal sculpture, 55 × 31 × 16 ½ in. (139.7 × 78.7 × 41.9 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift of the William S. Arnett Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2016.12.7. © 2021 Joe Minter / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 8 Lonnie Holley (American, b. 1950), Natural and Man-Made , 2004. Stone, wire, and metal, 20 × 11 × 14 in. (50.8 × 27.9 × 35.6 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift of the William S. Arnett Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2016.12.6. © 2021 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 9 Hawkins Bolden (American, 1914–2005), Untitled (Ham Can) , 1970s. Ham can, wire, and metal fence scrap, 14 ½ × 7 ½ × 3 ¼ in. (36.8 × 19.1 × 8.3 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.2. © 2021 Estate of Hawkins Bolden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 10 Ronald Lockett (American, 1965–1998), Remembering Sarah Lockett , ca. 1997. Metal, wire, wood, and paint, approximately 48 × 48 × 2 in. (121.9 × 121.9 × 5.1 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.52.5. © 2021 Estate of Ronald Lockett / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 11 Joe Lewis Light (American, 1934–2005), Blue Bird , 1987. Enamel and spray paint on wood door, 28 × 80 in. (71.1 × 202.3 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.6. © 2021 Estate of Joe Light / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 12 Luster Willis (American, 1913–1990), Hog Killing , 1986. Ballpoint pen, poster paint, glue, and glitter on poster board, 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.11. © 2021 Estate of Luster Willis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 13 Thornton Dial (American, 1928–2016), New Generation , 2002. Wood, cloth, metal, wire, and paint, approximately 69 ½ × 60 × 17 in. (176.5 × 152.4 × 43.2 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the William S. Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.51.1. © 2021 Estate of Thornton Dial / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 14 Purvis Young (American, 1943–2010), Pregnant Woman , no date. Paint on cloth with masking tape, glue, and kraft paper remnants, 29 ¼ × 15 in. (74.3 × 38.1 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.52.11. © Larry T. Clemons / Gallery 721 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 15 Nettie Young (American, 1916–2010), Bricklayer , no date. Corduroy, 95 × 92 in. (241.3 × 233.7 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the William S. Arnett Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2016.12.17. © 2021 Estate of Nettie Young / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 16 Mary Tillman Smith (American, 1904–1995), Figure in Blue on Red , 1987. Paint on plywood, 32 × 24 in. (81.3 × 61 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.52.6.

Plate 17 Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900–1982), Nellie’s House at Night , 1981. Felt-tip pen and crayon on paper, 18 ¾ × 24 in. (47.6 × 61 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.8. © 2021 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 18 Royal Robertson (American, 1936–1997), Mrs. Doeria , 1986. Marker and ballpoint pen on paper, 16 ¹⁵ / 16 × 11 ¹¹ / 16 in. (43 × 29.7 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Blanchard-Hill Collection, 2021.16.11. © 2021 Estate of Royal Robertson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 19 John B. Murray (American, 1908–1988), Untitled , ca. mid-1980s. Marker and paint on paper, 25 × ½ × 19 ½ in. (63.5 × 1.3 × 49.5 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, the Chair’s Discretionary Fund to Support Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and gift from Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.16.7. © 2021 Estate of John Bunion (J.B.) Murray / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 20 Ronald Lockett (American, 1965–1998), Fever Within , 1995. Tin, colored pencil, and nails on wood, 49 ¼ × 51 ³ / 16 in. (125.1 × 130 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Promised gift from John A. Powell, BA ʼ77, in honor of the museum’s 60th Anniversary. Lent by John A. Powell, BA ’77. © 2021 Estate of Ronald Lockett / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 21 Bessie Harvey (American, 1929–1994), Staff , ca. 1988. Wood, feathers, and paint, 32 ½ × 7 ¼ × 3 ¾ in. (82.6 × 18.4 × 9.5 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gift from the Arnett Collection and Ackland Fund, 2010.51.2.

Plate 22 Lonnie Holley (American, b. 1950), What Was beyond Us (The Ocean of Our Thoughts) , 2019. Globe and stand, model ships, rocks, and cast-iron pot, 40 ½ × 19 in. (102.9 × 48.3 cm).

Ackland Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, L2020.10.1a-o. Lent by John A. Powell, BA ’77. © 2021 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

BERNARD L. HERMAN

INTRODUCTION: THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF UNSETTLED THINGS

Art from an African American South

Questions of cultural power reside at the heart of how we imagine the compass of American art and its canons. How does art from an African American South confront and contest that power? What are the contours of that process? These are the core questions that animate the essays that follow. We look to art that we think we know and recognize the ways in which that art pushes back and destabilizes old habits of interpretation and conventions of understanding. All of the authors are uneasy with the old nomenclature of folk, outsider, vernacular, grass roots, and self-taught. When we apply a label—for example, folk or outsider—to any aspect of expressive culture, we position it as something other than ourselves; in that simple gesture we implicitly assert the power of our own cultural authority and the institutions we serve. Power does not describe itself; it describes its other. Accordingly, the authors explore different dimensions of the ways in which the imposition of critical categories too often frustrates the art they discuss and just as often aggrandizes existing, often hidden, structures of power. They advance fresh perspectives that enable us to engage the art with invigorated thinking. Their meditations undertake the demanding work of mapping the varied terrains of unsettled things.

This collection of essays, however, does not offer a false sense of consensus. Rather, its larger purpose is to encourage a diversity of thought and interpretation that is necessary for realigning the arc of histories of American art. The art feeds each author’s wellspring of ideas even as each author’s ideas inform the others’ interpretations. Their explorations offer compelling beginnings fueled by the creative work of Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, Mary Lee Bendolph, Joe Light, Thornton Dial, and their peers. When the art of Lonnie Holley, for example, enters art historical conversations, it often does so in language that privileges unmediated creative instinct over artistic thoughtfulness. Even on the historic occasion when the works by artists discussed in this volume find a home in major American museums, institutional press releases herald their arrival with a hint of uncertainty about exactly how they will fit into the larger scheme of the collections. The unspoken challenge is a simple one: on the basis of this creative expression, to reimagine what we embrace as American art and how we do so. It also asks us why now, in this cultural and political moment. Unsettled things, as the authors note, are restless. Unfinished business may never find resolution. Engaging the art, the contributors to this volume seek to preserve its unsettled natures, its capacity to make us confront creative and critical worlds and think them anew.

I begin this introduction with the problem of categories, but not as a reprise of what others have glibly labeled term warfare. The difficulty resides not in labels of folk or self-taught, but rather in the often deeply naturalized and unarticulated ideologies of cultural value that they summon into view. The question whether a term works or not avoids the point of its larger purpose—that is, why we need categories that stake and police cultural production, and the deeper work that language performs in contexts of cultural power. A core attribute of unsettled things is that they are unsettling in ways that reveal constructions of old habits of authority.

Witnessed through the art, the unsettled natures of the creative works engaged in these essays, and their reception in gallery, classroom, and collection, are a reckoning, a call to account that is sometimes gentle and sometimes confrontational. The artists’ creations exert expressive agency in a land and history where agency has been denied by law and custom, circumscribed by convention, and devalued by system. The unsettled nature of the art reveals fault lines that fracture cultural power, revealing its inherent inequalities and instabilities. Let’s look, for instance, at how the artists’ work represented in the essays and images that follow reveal and resist critical pathologies around a connoisseurship of dysfunction, anxieties of authenticity, and an authority of margins.

A connoisseurship of dysfunction speaks to critical acts that locate the art within regimes of otherness built through assertions of identity. Dysfunction, here, inscribes the objects as somehow broken and redeemed around factors of race, education, poverty, isolation, incarceration, innocence, mental illness, religious belief, family structure, and class. Positioned as an art of absences, its reception redounds to the reputation of more privileged presences that valorize the art and artists as creatively miraculous, rising out of the ashes of hardship and want. Damned by faint praise, the art triumphs through an authority that is positioned on the margins of mainstream aesthetics. In essence, the art is held up as a mirror of an imagined other that is in fact an imagined inner self. Compassionate viewers, voyeurs of sorts, recognize and validate themselves through acts of critical largesse wherein the triumphant spirit inscribed on the art is theirs to bestow. It is, as David Batchelor writes in Chromophobia, a whiteness that bleaches everything in its presence.¹

A connoisseurship of dysfunction relies on biographical constructions that produce multiple outcomes. First, the work of art becomes a proxy object for the collection and exhibition of its maker—a positioning that relies on implicit assumptions of alterity and aberration. From that perspective, the object stands in for the person as exemplar and specimen, not unlike an exotic possession in a curated cabinet of curiosities that serves as a source for critical conversation performed to the credit of the collector. Second, biography premised on the construction of dysfunction or nonnormative creative identity becomes a tool for containment that limits the artist’s agency. Thus, the art exists in spite of or because of the details expressed in constructed and reported contexts that are rooted in narratives of difference. Value placed on a perceived lack of formal art training, assertions of ad hoc practice, foregrounded conditions of poverty, and more relegate artists to the status of bricoleurs who spontaneously, defiantly, and wondrously create within contexts of want. Equally implicit is an underlying formulation in which spontaneity trumps thoughtfulness. Third, the art and its maker become an inverse index to normalcy by virtue of inscribed exceptionality. The work of art is a gauge that locates the viewer in a hierarchical relationship to the maker—both enmeshed in a system where critical ability holds greater sway than creative agency. Fourth, the art and its maker are, in turn, tethered to an aggregated and consolidated system of difference. Dysfunction operates only within a relational scheme that inherently relies on associations that are, in effect, categorical diagnoses that pathologize an expressive culture of otherness. The most visible manifestations of this critical malaise are found on neatly typed labels in exhibition halls and in catalog entries that underscore ascriptions of absence or lack. Take, for example, a label that might read something like, Late in life, {insert artist name here}, impoverished and isolated, began using found materials to make art. When we diagram this sentence, we see that a statement of this sort (and there are many like it) pathologizes the maker and places the art at the farthest remove. Thus, dysfunction is curated, collected, and positioned as a precondition for the art’s reception.

The work of a connoisseurship of dysfunction brings us to anxieties of authenticity. Authenticity is a determination of an essential identity that is revealed through the representation and positioning of expressive culture as an ideologically contextualized persona and commodity. Although authenticity is typically a projection of alterity, we also use the word to describe our own motives when we evoke our own authentic selves. In essence, authenticity operates as a subtly coded projection of essential truthfulness and integrity. An authentic work is true to its maker, process, and use. The maker, in turn, possesses the truth of making that is discovered in the particular expressions of knowledge as practice. That truthfulness serves three key purposes: it is value added in the marketplace, it renders the object as somehow unimpeachable through invocations of context, and it is a foundation of connoisseurship. Authenticity, then, avers honesty through an archaeology of context. And, like connoisseurship, authenticity relies on acts of discernment that are grounded in the possession of a privileged body of knowledge and the ability to deploy that knowledge in acts that sustain (and sometimes challenge) perceptions of distinction, relative value, and hierarchy.

Anxieties of authenticity derive from an inherent instability in all acts of discernment that engage and determine identity—especially when it comes to a connoisseurship of dysfunction. Gallerists use the attributes of outsider or self-taught art to promote their wares. The artist somehow stands apart from influences, which are largely framed as academic or formal. They make art that expresses the unadulterated, unmediated purity of their creativity. We look at the drawing, painting, sculpture, book, or assemblage and we embrace a social and political construction of honesty, integrity, and truthfulness. In that act of assignment, we position the work and its maker in reference to ourselves and to histories and rhetoric of craft that extend back to the nineteenth century.² We may lack in ourselves the authenticity to create art, but we possess the power to assert, curate, and know its presence—and its value. Claims to authenticity are inescapably nervous and nerve-racking. Their anxiety may begin with the object, but it is ultimately about curation and a worrying concern around our ability to judge the real deal. We find ourselves compelled to build a case for the art in a way that argues for our ability to know it in relation to the social worlds we inhabit.

Anxieties of authenticity, however, do not trouble artists like Mary Lee Bendolph, Nettie Young, and the other quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose art now resides in major museum collections across the United States. The question for the Gee’s Bend artists, as Lucy Mingo phrased it in the wake of the enthusiastic reception of her quilts in museum exhibitions, is about how objects own history and who lays claim to those histories. Describing the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers’ distinction between ugly quilts and pretty quilts during a 2007 conversation, Mingo mapped a connection between authenticity and history:

I always liked beautiful quilts. That’s what all I made until I started working with our quilts. I made beautiful quilts. All my quilts was beautiful. I just liked pattern quilts and that’s the way my mom brought me up. You know the way you’re brought up—it’s hard to get away from that. And I just liked the pattern quilts I was doing. See, I call those pretty quilts. But our quilts, we call those ugly quilts … we call those strip quilts, housetop, pig-in-the-pen. But when you got a pattern—well, if it’s a flower garden, a monkey wrench, or something like that, they’re pretty quilts.³

The distinction Lucy Mingo and others in her community make is that ugly quilts come from the top of your head and come down through family. See, when my mother was making quilts before she was able to get material to make pattern quilts, she just made string quilts and quilted down through the family with old pants, jeans. Pretty quilts come from a book. Arguably, both Lucy Mingo’s pretty and ugly quilts are authentic, but the ugly quilts—fashioned in contexts of necessity and making do—are more authentic within socially mapped acts of discernment.

Mingo’s words and the ideas of a connoisseurship of dysfunction and anxieties of authenticity bring us back to a recognition of an authority of margins. The deployment of modifiers such as folk, self-taught, outsider, or vernacular resonates with long-established Western ideas of property and enclosure. Think of these terms as a form of fencing installed around the art in question: such language contains, constrains, and directs how the art is positioned to be seen even before those acts of seeing take place. As liberating as the language may pretend to be, it still encircles and categorizes—and in this context openly asserts a culture of ownership. Thus we read in a very early review of the art of Thornton Dial that he is a master of the ad hoc. ⁴ In one